Gordon Lightfoot’s show Saturday night in Binghamton is billed as part of the “50 Years on the Carefree Highway Tour” — a half-century mark that reflects his emergence as part of Toronto’s folk scene in the early 1960s.

The Canadian folk/rock legend has been performing onstage for nearly all of his 74 years, though, starting as a boy soprano and learning to play acoustic guitar as well as piano and drums in high school.

Even today, despite serious health scares in the past decade, he performs about 60 concerts annually and has not lost the excitement of sharing his music live.

“I’m very grateful to be able to continue on doing something I love,” Lightfoot said in an interview last week. “I have a passion for it, I try to stay prepared and I’m always ready to play the music. I’ve stayed that way my whole life.”

The great thing about being Lightfoot is that his 20-album career includes so many iconic hits — “Carefree Highway,” “If You Could Read My Mind,” “Sundown,” “Rainy Day People,” “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” and others — he’s never at a loss for something to play.

But here’s the tricky bit: He likes to figure out setlists that give audiences what they want while also sharing worthy tunes that didn’t make the same splash in the charts (“Cotton Jenny,” “The Watchman’s Gone,” “Beautiful”) or were made more famous by others, such as “Ribbon of Darkness” (a No. 1 hit for Marty Robbins) and “Early Morning Rain” (often sung by Elvis Presley during his 1970s comeback).

“We have quite a rotational system set up,” Lightfoot said. “We don’t do the shows the same all the time. We have two different ways of tackling a show, but without losing any of the standards. Everything that goes around that is in a state of rotation, so that way we get to cover our entire available repertoire, which is roughly 42 songs right now, and

you would never do that many songs in one two-hour show.

“We can do about 26 tunes in that length of time, and I’m conscious of time — I like to start on time and I like to finish on time. I think it’s courteous to people and they enjoy the show a lot more when it’s tight and professionally presented, so that’s the way we do it. …

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“It’s fun because it’s a challenge to make it good and to make it flow, to get that feeling where every song is different from every other song in the show. I like to be able to do that.”

Helping to keep things on the rails are longtime band members Rick Haynes (bass), Barry Keane (drums/percussion) and Michael Heffernan (keyboards), who will perform with Lightfoot at the Forum along with 2011 addition Carter Lancaster (lead guitar).

Over his long career, Lightfoot been mentioned as a favorite songwriter of Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash and Jimmy Buffett, and his tunes have been covered by dozens of other musicians. He’s been nominated for five Grammys and won 16 Juno Awards (the Canadian equivalent of the Grammys). Still, he said he was surprised by his induction into the Songwriters Hall of Fame last June.

“When the day finally came, I was on tour, so we had to get into New York to get it done and it was quite thrilling. We got to meet Kenny Rogers and Stevie Nicks, we had Meat Loaf and Bob Seeger and Ben E. King — they all performed, and I performed. I met a whole bunch of great people,” Lightfoot said. “It’s a real honor to be inducted into that society.”

Lightfoot’s songwriting skill first brought attention among U.S. music executives when “For Loving Me” became a hit for folk trio Peter, Paul & Mary.

“That’s how I got my foot in the door in the States, because I got a management contract from that. I was accepted into the industry in the United States in 1965,” he said. “I had to work (and) I had to come up with the material — I did one album a year for the first five years. I worked hard, and they did a great job and they got me a great record deal with Warner Bros. — 14 albums there with Warner Bros., so we had a great run of it.”

Of all of the artists who have recorded his tunes over the years, Lightfoot has a soft spot for the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll.

“I’ve never heard a cover recording I didn’t like, but the one that’s a favorite is the Elvis Presley one, ‘Early Morning Rain.’ It’s on his ‘Elvis Now’ album,” he said. “Peter, Paul & Mary and Ian & Sylvia were the first ones to do it, and it came to Elvis a little bit later.”

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One of Lightfoot’s signature songs is “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” based on the 1975 sinking of a freighter in Lake Superior that killed all 29 crew members. Originally meant as an album cut, Warner Bros. released it as a single after it became a radio hit in Detroit and the Great Lakes region.

The tragedy and its legacy are now woven into the fabric of Lightfoot’s life.

“Since 1977, I’ve supported a scholarship at the Great Lakes Maritime Academy in Traverse City, Michigan, to show my appreciation in some small way,” he said. “I realize that without the song, my career could have been finished. I was on a bit of a slide at that time, and I was still drinking at that time.

“I stayed in touch with all the people there for years and years and years, and we still do to this very day. … They had an event for close relatives 15 years ago in Michigan, and there were 800 people there.”

Telling the story of

the Edmund Fitzgerald is important enough to Lightfoot that when scientists proved three years ago that blown hatch covers did not cause the sinking, he now alters the lyric in question when he performs the song live.

“I’m happy that no one ever forgot about the Edmund Fitzgerald,” he said. “It was one of the reasons why I wrote that song, because I didn’t like the attention it got in the newspapers. All it got was a column and a half in Newsweek. I was incensed.

“I was writing songs at the time, and I said, ‘I have an idea, I have a plan, I have a melody, I have some chords’ — and I did have a structure of a song, but didn’t know what to put into it lyrically. When I heard that story, it gave me an idea. I’d written about shipwrecks before but I never liked how they came out, so I said, ‘I’m going to make this one right’ — and except for the hatch covers, I got it just about perfect.”